Photographer sheds a little light on his art

Sunday

Peter Anger’s artworks feel alive, crackling, buzzing, pulsing with energy. Pay them enough attention, and they even seem to hum a familiar gospel tune, though the words have changed ever so slightly.

It is no little light that Anger wields. His is a great light, and he is going to let it shine in a new exhibit, R*G*B, which opens at Columbia College’s Greg Hardwick Gallery tomorrow.

A fine-art and commercial photographer who has lived in Columbia on and off since 1969 — continuously since 1985 — Anger has increasingly felt at home within a worldwide community of artists who call themselves light painters. The realm of photographers, Anger defined light painting simply as “a photograph made with light.” While Anger’s images contain multitudes — strange geometries, intense relationships, brilliant colors – the process is, for him, a very personal one, a way of breaking art-making into as few elements as possible.

Anger’s light paintings typically spring from shoots that involve just him, his camera, a darkened room and “an arrangement of several fixed neon lights,” he said in an email, “open the camera up for several seconds and paint the light into the camera moving the camera. … Really simple, but the results are endless depending on the lights, the arrangement and how you move through them.”

For Anger and other light painters, there is a definite sense of working without a net, of living amid limitless possibilities and changing the limits of what we already see and know. In this world of working, Anger is both a photographer and a painter, neon lights his paintbrushes, the darkness a canvas waiting to be decorated. Yet, the one element doing no more and no less than it has always promised is the camera — Anger called light painting “a pure artistic expression of what a camera does … record light.”

Depending on where you draw the boundary lines of mediums and art history, light painting is an exercise with origins parallel to those of photography itself. A chronology on the Light Painting World Alliance website, a group to which Anger belongs, notes that the first heliographs “painted the sun” and planted seeds for later mediums and expressions to bloom under that warm light. While various techniques would eventually amass into what is now known as light painting, several sources trace the first deliberate example back to 1889, when French scientist-artists Etienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny used light to track and trace the human body in motion.

Light painting was expanded and extended into the mainstream by artists from Man Ray to Gjon Mili, who painted and drew light with Picasso and Matisse and had his images published in one of the 20th-century’s arbiters of great photographic taste, LIFE magazine.

Anger’s history with light painting dates back to the 1980s, a time when less like-minded work was being done, he said. The advance of digital photography allowed more room to roam, though he said many similar methods are casually called light painting.

R*G*B will help bring light painting into focus for local viewers. The show will feature 10 Anger images, three 40-inches by 100-inches works and seven that measure 26˝ inches by 40 inches, unified by common colors. While the works are impressive in scale, they represent the artist’s purposeful path toward simplicity.

Anger has completed similar works on a smaller scale, he said, but the emotional or visceral impact was less powerful than he wished. “With the small, well-lit, state-of-the art Greg Hardwick Gallery and the large prints, the impact and experience of the color fields I have created in these images will be unavoidable.”

Before the viewer can reckon with these images, Anger must reconcile the technical impositions of working at such a scale. An ink-jet printer maximizes what Anger can create and minimizes the amount of resources used and potentially wasted. Still, “I must admit I do miss working in the darkroom. There was something magical about photographic printing as a process — sitting at a computer terminal and listening to the printer hum for four hours as it makes a print just is not the same,” he said.

What the viewer sees in Anger’s images is a matter of reference and experience. Some might see science in living color — a historically faithful view, as early light paintings were made to chronicle activity for scientific study — while others might simply encounter a series of hypnotic swells and swirls.

When Anger looks at the images, he sees, on one level, the “most vivid light color I’ve found for making images.” On another, he reads them like maps that present geography through light. He refers to several of the works as landscapes and, in this way, is guiding the viewer toward seeing the unseen, granting an opportunity to be affected by what we take for granted. We are used to tracing horizon lines, noting the change from peak to valley, in natural vistas before us. Finding the same topographical features in beams and waves of light might present new ways to read our environment. Light, in some form or fashion, is a constant companion — if we let it, Anger’s work can help us experience it afresh and become more aware of all it illuminates.

Ultimately, Anger’s hope is that he has stripped away all the extras and elements and created a chance encounter between viewer and pure color. Color has meant everything to him, and he is clearly excited by the prospect of it meaning something to viewers.

“For me, as a minimalist and abstract painter, all I’m really trying to achieve is an emotional response to the color and the arrangement of color design fields that are created when working with the camera and just the lights,” he said.

R*G*B will be on display through a closing reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Aug. 22. Learn more about Anger’s work at peteranger.com.

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